A survey by Yougov shows that the share of people working from home has fallen from 27% to 15% after the lockdown in France, much faster than in the United Kingdom. And people at risk are no more likely to be working from home than the average of those surveyed.

Are we at the beginning of a remote working revolution, or will the Covid year be just a break in the business world? Whatever happens, working from home has now fallen in France, despite the epidemic risk.

This emerges from a survey carried out by Yougov for the company Cardiosens at the beginning of August, among 4,000 people in France and as many in the United Kingdom, and published in the newspaper Les Échos.

Among the people in employment, i.e. neither unemployed, nor studying, nor retired, and having continued to work during the confinement, 27% were working from home. However, three months later, only 15% were still doing so.

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A sharp fall, to be compared with the situation in the United Kingdom. On the other side of the Channel, there was a higher rate of remote working among those who continued to work, both during the lockdown (35%) and at the beginning of August (29%).

The trend towards a return to old on-site working habits has been more significant in France, where teleworking has fallen by 44% in three months, compared with only 18% in the United Kingdom. The drop was even greater in Paris, where the share of working from home fell from 45% to 22%, and in the Île-de-France (Paris region), from 39% to 14%.

However, the National Public Health Agency warned at the end of July about the increase in infections.

However, the survey was carried out just before the Labour Minister, Elisabeth Borne, talked in the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche about the compulsory wearing of masks in companies, calling for “teleworking to be implemented wherever in regions where the virus is actively circulating”.

The September impasse

“The drop is for a combination of two factors”, analyses Mathias Matallah, founder and president of the Medecine4I cabinet and Yougov’s French partner.

Three-quarters of the people already teleworking have stopped it with the end of the confinement. “Only 11% of people exiting short-time working have switched to working from home at the national level and 20% in the Île-de-France region,” he points out.

According to him, the government is going to find itself in September “in a dangerous impasse.” “It had calibrated the management of traffic in public transport and the filling of the office towers of La Défense to a rate of teleworking of at least 50%. We are very far from the target,” he notes.

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No gifts for vulnerable employees

Why such a discrepancy with the British situation? The weight of the financial sector across the Channel – with 2 million jobs compared to 650,000 in France – may play a role. These are jobs that can easily be carried out remotely.

“Teleworking depends on factors much more related to the employee’s level of qualification or the structure in which he works than to personal health and the need to avoid social interactions as much as possible,” explains Damien Philippot, a consultant for Medecine4I.

On the other hand, employees who were at risk from the disease were not spared the need to visit their workplace during the peak of the epidemic.

Indeed, workers who considered themselves to belong to a “risk” population were less present on site (17%, compared with an average of 23% for all employees). But factual risk factors were not necessarily taken into account. For example, 24% of obese employees with a body mass index of over 30 had to go to work on-site during confinement.

The percentage was only slightly lower (22%) for employees with long-term illnesses (diabetes, cancer, etc.). But it is over the duration that this protected status makes the difference, since at the beginning of August, this category of chronically ill people rose to 27% in working from home, compared to 15% on the national average, when the lockdown ended.